[p_l]

Then you have a pretty nice bubble (this is not in jest, I honestly envy you).

A more nuanced take is that I can, in practice, map considerable chunk of developers I met and their understanding of memory as:

"it's magic" > "manual memory management rulz! my C/C++/Rust will be always better than GC" >>> people who actually studied automatic memory management a bit >> people who adjust memory management techniques to specific use cases

The fall off is pretty much exponential in amount of people, which I will admit does make some people defensive thanks to second group being both numerically big and undying because programmers suck at educating new generations. Same can be seen in various other areas, not just GC (though GC links with general trope of "opinions formed from people repeating things learnt from xeroxed half dog eaten copies of notes somewhat relevant on 256kB IBM 5150 PC and Turbo Pascal")

A lot of the time I do encounter people who essentially parrot claims about GC without any understanding of what's happening underneath, and indeed sometimes going about "crazy awesome non-GC solution!" that turns out to call out to whatever malloc()/free() happens to live in libc when I pull the cover and with just as much unpredictability as you can get.

As for paying - allocations in GC systems tend to be blindingly fast, but yes, collection does involve other costs.